Sourcing and Procurement in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111

Hello Everyone, My name is Harish Mangtani and I work for the SAP S/4HANA Product Success team at SAP SE Germany.  I hope you read my blogs for the last releases of SAP S/4HANA Cloud to gain insights into the key innovations we have delivered,  do check out here – 2108 and 2105

Join me again this time to gain insights into the key innovations of SAP S/4HANA Cloud release 2111 in Sourcing and Procurement as we continue to drive innovation and value for our customers.

Let’s start with the Product Video where I can walk you through the 4 major innovations of this release.

Key Highlights:

SAP Product Footprint Management

• Procurement Embedded Product Footprint Management

Purchase Contracts

• New Pricing User Interface in Purchase Contracts for time-dependent conditions

Operational Procurement (Purchase Orders)

• New App  Manage Supplier Confirmations

Operational Procurement (Purchase Requisition)

• Integration of Purchase Requisition Object Pages into My Inbox App

Central Procurement

• Enterprise Search support for business objects in Central Purchasing and Central Contracting
• Restart of failed automation rules in the Process Purchase Requisitions Centrally app

Cross Features

• Product Sourcing Integration with SAP S/4HANA for ECM (Enterprise Contract Management)

Integration

• Supplier Master Data Integration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111 using SAP Master Data Integration (MDI)

SAP Product Footprint Management

Let’s start with the most important topic which is about embedding Sustainability into your Business DNA and end-to-end processes. Our ambition is to provide product footprints to our customers to help you reduce carbon emissions across the value chain and empower you to make better and informed low carbon decisions with the help of SAP Product Footprint Management, an application that runs on SAP Business Technology Platform(SAP BTP).

For a more detailed product deep dive, please read this blog: Product Deep Dive: Welcome to Product Footprint Management from SAP

Procurement Embedded Product Footprint Management

SAP Product Footprint Management (PFM) application collects data from business systems, data is calculated based on material movements and plant details. The application further processes the data along with secondary data for sustainability and provides the Product Carbon Footprint for a particular product. These footprints are then replicated to the SAP S/4HANA Cloud System for consumption by business scenarios and help our customers and end-users make sustainable decisions.

With this cloud release of SAP S/4HANA, we help users to analyze this data for Procurement Processes in the following ways:

Purchase Order Items

SAP PFM application enables purchasers to calculate footprints for purchased products at scale. Users can access the product footprint data from the PFM application by clicking on the Material Name and the “View Product Footprints” link to immediately find product footprint details in Purchase Orders Items.

Pic1: Product Footprint – Purchase Order Items

Purchase Requisition Item

As a Strategic Buyer,  while creating a Purchase Requisition, you have the option now to open the “material value help” to see details on Product Footprint data replicated by the PFM application to track the carbon footprint. You will be able to see two additional columns displaying the amount of CO2 equivalent and unit of measurement of the product footprint of the requested materials.

Product Footprint – PR Item

Product Carbon Footprint Analytics

With the Product Carbon footprint analytics application, users can now track metrics that are vital to achieving your organization’s sustainability goals. It provides real-time insights into carbon footprint values for requested products and related purchase requisition amounts across various dimensions, such as by product, product category, plant, and as list view. Users can compare carbon footprint across various products and gain insights into the relevance and significance of the product by seeing the related purchase requisition amount of this product.

Pic3: Product Carbon Footprint Analytics

Therefore, it helps with transparency to reduce the carbon footprint of the products and make sustainable decisions in your organization.

Note: Users must be subscribed to the SAP PFM application on SAP Business Technology Platform(SAP BTP).

Purchase Contracts

New Pricing User Interface in Purchase Contracts for time-dependent conditions

In a Purchase Contract, one of the key activities performed by the Purchaser is the maintenance of price information that is negotiated with suppliers, as purchase contracts are used as source-of-supply for follow-on processes like purchase orders, where the price information of the purchase contract is used.

We have introduced the new Pricing User Interface at the item level as the latest enhancement to our app for users to maintain purchase contracts which enable users to maintain price information for different time periods. Users are able to perform real-time price simulation for an item and understand the effective value with a highly intuitive UI that provides a holistic picture of the price information maintained in a purchase contract item.

In addition to the maintenance of plant-independent conditions, it is also possible to maintain plant-specific conditions, which supports advanced price-maintenance capabilities with solution support for most calculation-schematic configurations with easier price maintenance for the purchaser.

Pic 4: New Pricing UI for Purchase Contract Items

Operational Procurement (Purchase Orders)

New App – Manage Supplier Confirmations

With this release, we have a new app Manage Supplier Confirmations, with this app users can create, manage, and search for order acknowledgments to ensure that they receive the ordered items in the required quantity at the defined delivery date.

You can create new supplier confirmations from scratch, enter confirmations for a purchase order as a whole, and process a single or a series of confirmations at once. You can perform activities like edit confirmations, add confirmation lines, add confirmation items and change them, delete whole confirmations, individual confirmation items, and individual confirmation lines.

With this new business object, the supplier confirmations are now separated from the purchase orders but are still connected.

Pic 5: Manage Supplier Confirmations

Operational Procurement (Purchase Requisition)

Integration of Purchase Requisition Object Pages into My Inbox App

SAP S/4HANA Cloud System end-users use “My Inbox” App very frequently to check their inbox items and assigned activities. If we talk about end-users of Procurement Solutions, they also use this app to view the Purchase Requisition work item and then make a decision and take action.

We have integrated Purchase Requisition Object pages into My Inbox app, it is now easier and more convenient for requesters and approvers to make decisions on the purchase requisition as all the necessary information is available within the same application. With this feature, on selecting a work item from your task list, Requesters and approvers can view the complete purchase requisition header or item object page embedded in My Inbox.

It is possible to personalize the view by choosing the required columns, filters, sorting, and grouping therefore it increases efficiency as the details can be accessed easily before making decisions on the requisitions with more ease of use as the required information is available within the same application.

Pic 6: Integration of PR into My Inbox App

Central Procurement

Enterprise Search support for business objects in Central Purchasing and Central Contracting

Central Procurement helps to control the procurement processes centrally from the Hub SAP S/4HANA Cloud Central system from multiple connected backend systems. Gaining fast access to all business documents and having high transparency is key for a central purchaser of a multi-ERP procurement landscape in Central Procurement.

It is now possible to search for central purchase contracts, centrally managed purchase requisitions, and purchase orders directly via the integrated Enterprise Search of the Fiori launchpad from a Central System, Users make use of the powerful Enterprise Search within SAP S/4HANA System in order to search his relevant purchase requisitions and purchase orders from all connected satellite systems, as well as any centrally negotiated contracts. They can display the main data of the found business objects in the search result section along with filter options and navigation links into the object page and corresponding Fiori apps.

It helps to improve efficiency and transparency when working with business objects in Central Procurement and gives faster access to a purchasing document’s main business data and related applications.

Pic 7: Enterprise Search in Central Procurement

Restart of failed automation rules in the Process Purchase Requisitions Centrally app

One of Central Purchasing’s strongest assets is the automation framework for background processing of purchase requisitions, which saves the central purchaser from his daily, repetitive routine of checking the completeness and correctness of the demands under his responsibility.

With this latest enhancement to our framework, Purchasers can directly display failed automation status and all of the failed automation rules and corresponding error messages for each of their requisitions within the purchaser`s central cockpit. They can instantly interact with them and can restart all failed rules or only individual rules in the background, including a manual refresh option for the updated rule results. After taking corrective measures, they can retrigger the processing of these rules, so that purchase requisitions get reprocessed for a second time.

This increases transparency on the detailed outcome of the purchase requisition automation rules and improves processing efficiency by allowing purchasers to interact with failed automation rules and restart them manually after exceptions have been corrected.

Pic 8: Restart of failed automation in PR Central App

Cross Features

Product Sourcing Integration with SAP S/4HANA for ECM (Enterprise Contract Management)

SAP S/4HANA offers integrated Contract Management, which is the next-generation suite of applications for the creation and management of legal documents for Intelligent Enterprise Organizations. Customers can manage the lifecycle of all legal content (sell-side, buy-side & corporate contracts, NDAs, policies & patents, etc.) in one central repository, as a core capability of S/4HANA (On-Prem or Cloud) which seamlessly integrates into core business processes.

This enables Easy & fast enterprise-wide search of all legal documents, Analyze Contracts, tracks progress, and focuses on contracting matters that require attention for more speed, efficiency, and agility in contract management processes.

This helps to gain full transparency into legal contracts and other legal documents enterprise-wide by simplifying processes with online contract requests, automating contract creation, using workflows, managing document versions, standardizing reviews, approvals, and processing.

ECM for SAP S/4HANA Cloud is available from Cloud release 2108 and with the release of 2111 we have enhanced it with two new features:

Recurring Reminders: Users can send recurring reminders. The recurrence can be set to daily, monthly, or yearly. To end the recurrence users can define a specific end date or a certain number of recurrences.

Extensibility of Linked Objects: With this feature, you can extend the field of linked objects as per your business needs by using BAdIs to add custom fields in the Linked Objects facet of Manage Context and/or Manage Legal Transactions

Pic 9: ECM for SAP S/4HANA

Product Roadmap for ECM can be found in the link here. 

Please Note: Separate License might be required for SAP S/4HANA for ECM based on features and deployment model – Cloud, On-Premise, Private Cloud, HEC, etc. If you need more information you can contact me further.

Integration

Supplier Master Data Integration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111 using SAP Master Data Integration (MDI)

Now, for customers using Intelligent Enterprise Solutions(IES) for Source to Pay(S2P), we introduce support for Supplier Data integration between SAP Ariba applications and SAP S/4HANA Cloud using SAP Master Data Integration (MDI).

This integration supports the following SAP Source to Pay business processes:

• Guided Buying Capability with SAP Ariba Buying (2NV)

• Sourcing with SAP Ariba Sourcing (4BL)

• Contract Management with SAP Ariba Contracts (4AZ)

This means the replication of Business Partner supplier data from SAP S/4HANA Cloud to SAP Ariba applications is automated now via SAP Master Data Integration (MDI), therefore it is not required to load supplier data manually anymore.

There are prerequisites to be performed before the feature can be used completely and it is available now with restrictions which can be found here in the What’s new document.

Pic 10: Supplier Data Integration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud using MDI

Well, that is all I wanted to share with you in this release, if you have any questions or thoughts feel free to post in the comments section or you can also ask directly in the SAP Community 

Do follow my profile if you would like to know the latest and greatest features in Sourcing & Procurement with every release.

Dive deeper by checking out the following links:

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info here
• Jan Gilg SAP News Center article here
• Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release Blogs here and previous release highlights here
• Product videos on our SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA YouTube playlist
• SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here
• Early Release Webinar Series here
• Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
• openSAP Microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA here
• Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud Community: here
• Feature Scope Description here
• What’s New here
• Help Portal Product Page here
• Implementation Portal here

Follow us via @SAP and #S4HANA, or myself on @LinkedinHarish & @twitterHarryMangtani